Hello
I am running the latest version of motion on a nearly new imac but the frame rate is dropping to 1/3 pf what it should be. Sometimes its using emitters and replicators, which i get, but often its simple behaviours or moving geometry. Surely simple movement shouldnt make the machine slow down this much. Its almost like theres a tick box ive missed somewhere.
Anyone having similar issues?
"Nearly new" iMac probably means you have a retina display. Try setting the Render > Resolution to Half. Leave the Quality at Normal. It will quite nearly like the old "Full" resolution in your older Mac and perform much better. You can tell by the size of the image below how much more screen real estate is used with Retina displays! If it's "twice" the size - it's 4x the number of pixels that must be calculated per frame.
Gladly.
Also below are the details of the mac.
To give this some background, the projects I am working on are for advertising. We are making animated visuals for use on social media. We are operating at 60fps as out tests have shown that 30fps isnt smooth enough. However, before you say drop it to 30 and just go with that, when we set our projects to 30fps the actual playback is around 15, so it seems that whatever we do the frame rate drops a lot.
Heres is a wetransfer link to a recent project:
Frame rate on this drops to 20, even with the render set to half.
Sadly thats not making a vast amount of difference. Its happening on almost every project too. Ive watched a log of how tos on line and copied them and whilst the online version seems to work fine, mine is slowing a lot. Usually it starts to slow about 1/4 way through a project. My projects are also about 15 seconds long by the way, so its not hours and hours of video.
Emitters and particles generally do have high demands on computation powers. Create a thousand particles, add some 'physics' as Gravity + collision detection => slooow.
Same story with 'matryoshka-ing' Behaviors such as Align-to: when position of object A depends on position of object B, which depends on position of object C … you get the idea.
No general advice, depends on complexity of project, less on sheer length.
wow, a 90MB Motion project… !
I just have the time for a quick overview… You're using Motion as a replacement for Illustrator, I think… In my lil' corner, I'd using designated 'paint' apps to … ehm, paint illustrations, putting elements on separate layers, and import those .psd files …
Next… I notice alone 10 duplicates of your 'Logo' group - just to wiggle the objects = consider usage of Behaviors for such simple animations.
Same with 'masking' - you use tons of Bezier-objects to create 'covers' - these adds to the - imho - unneeded complexity of your project.
Some of your 'stills' are 4000 x 2500 pixel in size/4MB … but your project has the odd res of 1080x900… prepping the photos into needed res before import maybe reduces computation processes…-
etc.-
in short:
You 'abuse' Motion as an 'cells animated' cartoon maker… I dare to say, hundreds of layers of Bezier objects simply overwhelms your computer/the app… (sidenote: on my 2012 MacMini, the 45 sec movie playback drops too to 15-18fps…).
… maybe a bit unexpected advice on this board, but your workflow is maybe better suited with AfterEffects? 😮
Thank you very much for your help on this, some interesting points to digest with the team. We did try aftereffects, but as of now we are quite far down the rabbit hole with motion, and it would cause more problems to change over i think. I realise Motion probably isnt designed for this and i wont bore you with the back story of why we ended up using it.
I appreciate what you are saying about using behaviours. This project isnt actually mine, its a colleagues (we do the same thing though). Thing is behaviours often kill it just as bad with no images. We have yet to check any conflicts with the antivirus too.
again, thank you for looking at this.
You and I have the exact same machine specs (except the serial number 😉 ). There is nothing I could do to increase the playback speed past about 40fps for this project, so, about 2/3rds speed (that included reducing the memory size of the large images...) is the best I could get.
I did finally manage to get the project to run faster than its frame rate... I'll explain.
1) I turned off all the extra screen stuff: Layers and Media Previews and canvas overlays. This didn't make much difference (not as much as it used to!)
2) I went into Motion Preferences > Time > Playback Control and turned off Limit playback speed to project frame rate. This will usually let you squeeze out a few more fps... and I got about 3-5 more frames per second - definitely not enough to make this worth it.
3) changed the project frame rate to 30fps. This made a huge difference. With Playback Control off, I'm getting up to 35 fps in BEST rendering mode! BTW - you have to turn off Dynamic (Resolution) in order to get full quality images - Dynamic will make them look a little fuzzy.
I changed the frame rate by modifying the original project document in a text editor. While I was in there, I noticed that all the parts that are assembled into the Clone layer(s) had a Frame Rate set for 30. I have to wonder if Motion struggles to match/conform the 30fps media in a 60fps project... but I'm not going to let it prey on my mind 😉. I'm guessing that when you converted from a 30 to 60fps project, you copy/pasted the clone layers into the new version and they retained their original 30fps settings inherited from the slower frame rate project.
You can change the frame rate by opening the TM027418300Y project file in TextEdit (TextWrangler or BBedit recommended). Search for either "framerate" (one word) or "ntsc" (this is just a flag that indicates whether the project is drop frame or not -- ntsc = 30fps but appears as 29.97 in the project if NTSC=1). It will be in the <scene> tag and will be two lines that look like:
| <frameRate>60</frameRate> | |
| <NTSC>0</NTSC> |
[lines 258 and 259 in your project]
Just change 60 to 30 and save. Reopen the project in Motion. It will open as a 30fps project. [Check the Project Properties pane to make sure Frame Rate is set to 30.00 fps. (PS - this works. I've never had it break a project. I also do manual "back dating"/versioning of projects which has, to date, never broken either — but I am always very careful to make sure that everything in a project was available in previous versions of Final Cut before back dating.)]
After this change, I tried turning Playback Control back on. The frame rate drops back down to 26-28 fps during playback. If I turn ON Dynamic again, I get even fewer fps (23-26). This project ramps all of my processors to near 100% use (I have MenuMeters running all the time to watch how the processors are behaving.)
Karsten's suggestion about reducing the size of your images to fit the resolution, while in this instance didn't make a lot of difference, it is worth keeping in mind. You might try, if you're interested, is to delete the two Clone layers and re-creating in the 60fps project and see if that would make a difference. I would imagine that the framerate mismatch might make Motion work harder upon playback.
In any case, it usually doesn't take a terribly long time for Motion to Render a project. This one is a little too long for 24GB RAM Preview (at least at the default Preference setting of 80%), but rendering out as a ProRes (Proxy) mov for preview doesn't make that much difference in time and will provide you with an accurate visual feedback. Just keep rewriting over the same mov file for whatever project you're working on, like it's part of the application. [PS - ProRes Proxy is *not* the same thing as proxy files in Final Cut Pro. Proxy in FCPX is 1/4 resolution ProRes 422. ProRes Proxy is full resolution with greater compression than any of the other versions.]
Food for thought? HTH
Sadly this is even without the emitters. I get them and replicators slowing it all down. This is very simple image/text animation. Ill keep looking, ta.
…any chance you upload your project?
A lot to take in there. I will try all of that, as soon as i properly digest it. Thankyou for a very thorough response.
Frame rate dropping
